Genre
Top down
Couch Co-Op
Twin-stick shooter
Platform
PC
Engine
Unity
Time
4 weeks
Team Size
8
Roles
Game designer
Technical artist
Scrum Master
Link to game
Game Overview
Unwelcome Visitors is a top-down twin-stick shooter, where you and a friend play as two comedic alien monsters that both have two distinct abilities so that the players have their own agency but still be dependent on the other player to play the game in an efficient and fun way.
How is unwelcome visitors played
For game project 2 we were tasked to make a two player game with the theme of Symbiosis. We as a team quickly came together and decided to make a couch Co-Op game with a focus on combat.
We wanted the two players to have two ability's one attack and one utility that on their own are not very effective . But can be combined with the other player's ability to create more powerful abilities.
This led us to create an ability matrix with four different combo ability's three attacks and one shield healing.
E.g. One player can shoot an NPC with a fire attack and give the NPC the fire status effect. Then player two can shoot the same NPC with a wind attack affecting the NPC and with the mix of those two abilities creating a powerful Fire Tornado.
Technical art
At the start of this project we made the decision to keep the effects stylized as we had a relatively short time to create a lot of effects.
How we decided to tackle this issue was by having most of the effect using the same mesh (Icosphere) and have the materials on them somewhat simplistic and fully utilize the power of unity VFX graph and use movement to convey the different characteristic of the elements that we have.
At the start of this project we made the decision to keep the effects stylized as we had a relatively short time to create a lot of effects.
How we decided to tackle this issue was by having most of the effect using the same mesh (Icosphere) and have the materials on them somewhat simplistic and fully utilize the power of unity VFX graph and use movement to convey the different characteristic of the elements that we have.
What I learned and what I would change
1. Overall I think this was a very ambitious project for a relatively short period of time (only four weeks) that greatly benefited from having from the beginning a focus on modularity as reusable code and game art.
2. One of the main struggles we had was we didn't adequately teach the player all of the different combos of the abilities which caused some players to discover one ability combo and only use that. So one thing we could add is a puzzle element to the game were the players had use all of the abilities at least once to proceed though the level.
In conclusion
Unwelcome Visitors project has to be the most fun project that I have worked on. The team deciding to make an intentionally silly game was incredibly liberating and fun.
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Genre
Top down
Couch Co-Op
Twin-stick shooter
Platform
PC
Engine
Unity
Time
4 weeks
Team Size
Game designer
Technical artist
Scrum Master
Link to game
Game Overview
Unwelcome Visitors is a top-down twin-stick shooter, where you and a friend play as two comedic alien monsters that both have two distinct abilities so that the players have their own agency but still be dependent on the other player to play the game in an efficient and fun way.